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The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

politico.eu

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Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#71
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. If all it took was a $300k ad campaign on tiktok to get the population of a country(Romania in this case to be specific) to vote for a shady no-name candidate that came out of nowhere, instead of the well known candidates of the establishment, that should tell you the politics of your country betrayed its electorate so badly that they would rather commit national suicide instead of voting the establishment agai…

> tiktok only exposed that, it didn't cause that Actually both can be true.

Not in this case. Romanian people hated their corrupt politicians since way before tiktok was invented, so much so, that it's not even a partisan issue, all of them are equally unpopular. Tiktok only acted as release valve for that pent-up anger, but it's not the cause of it. The cause is 35+ years of rampant theft and corruption leading to misery and cases of death of innocent people.

So blaming of tiktok is a convenient scapegoat for Romania's corrupt establishment to legitimize themselves and deflect their unpopularity as if it's caused by Russian interference and not their own actions. NO, Russian interference just weaponized the massive unpopularity they already had.

So here's a wild idea on how to protect your democracy: how about instead of banning social media, politicians actually get off their kiddie fiddling islands, stop stealing everything not nailed to the ground and do right by their people, so that the voters don't feel compelled to pour gasoline on their country and light it on fire out of spite just to watch the establishment burn with it.

Because when people are educated, healthy, financially well off and taken care of by their government who acts in their best interest, then no amount of foreign social media propaganda can convince people to throw that all away on a dime. But if your people are their wits end and want to see you guillotined, then that negative capital can and will be exploited by foreign adversaries. Like how come you don't see Swiss or Norwegians trying to vote Russian puppets off TikTok to power and it's not because they have more control on social media than Romania.

This isn't a Romanian problem BTW, many western countries see similar political disenfranchisement today, and why you see western leaders rushing to ban or seize control of social media and free speech, instead of actually fixing their countries according to the pains of the voters.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s not equating all addictions beyond saying they are all addictions and should be treated as such.

But that's the problem - different substances require different solutions. You reduce sugar intake, not eliminate it. You eliminate cocaine intake, not just reduce it. Treating social media design as equal to something that can kill people in excess unnerves me.

It looks to me like you're adding the conflation to "all addictions" because you can clearly distinguish between "sugar" and "cocaine" as both forms of addictions.

Why would you not be willing to include "scrolling" as another form of addiction? Just because it's labeled the same way you yourself are demonstrating that we handle that in different ways.

Social Media is being treated as "sugar" in this instance instead of as "cocaine".

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive. Or you could just shut the phone off and/or not install the app. It's a simple solution, really, and one that is available at your disposal today at no cost.

Drug stores should stock morphine available without age restriction and if you don't want it, just don't buy it.

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Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is up to the websites to do that, and to the users to boycott those websites showing cookie popups.

The regulatory body could clarify that a DO NOT TRACK header should be interpreted as a "functional/necessary cookies only" request, so sites may not interrupt visitors with a popup modal/banner if it's set.

The do not track header was good enough in this German case: https://dig.watch/updates/german-court-affirms-legal-signifi...

Having the EU decide on a technical implementation is more of a last ditch effort, like what happened with more than a decade of the EU telling the industry to get its shit together and unify under a common charging port.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive. Or you could just shut the phone off and/or not install the app. It's a simple solution, really, and one that is available at your disposal today at no cost.

Just stop using heroin. Just stop eating fast food. Just stop going to the casino. Just don't smoke anymore. We know plenty of things are quite bad for us, and yet we find them difficult to stop. Somewhat famously difficult to stop. I think telling people, "just don't..." trivializes how difficult that is.

It's a phone. Put it in the trash. You will not go through physiological withdrawal symptoms.

The amount of people in here right now clamoring for legislation to keep them away from electronics which they themselves purchased is mind-bogglingly insane.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#79

I hope this goes through. Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive. It isn't a fair fight and the existence of infinite feeds is bad both for people and democracy. Regulating consumer products that cause harm to millions is nothing new.

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No. It's us humans that aren't very strong to begin with. To not admit it is to deny reality at this point.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#80

They should move to kill the cookie popup

ahhhh, every time the same discussion

1. GDPR consent dialogs are not cookie popups, most things you see are GDPR consent dialogs

2. GDPR consent dialogs are only required if you share data, i.e. spy on the user

3. GDPR had from the get to go a bunch of exceptions, e.g. you don't need permission to store a same site cookie indicating that you opted out of tracking _iff_ you don't use it for tracking. Same for a lot of other things where the data is needed for operation as long as the data is only used with that thing and not given away. (E.g. DDOS protection, bot detection, etc.)

4. You still had to inform the user but this doesn't need any user interacting, accepting anything nor does it need to be a popup blocking the view. A small information in the corner of the screen with a link to the data policy is good enough. But only if all what you do falls under 3. or non personal information. Furthermore I think they recently have updated it to not even require that, just having a privacy policy in a well know place is good enough but I have to double check. (And to be clear this is for data you don't need permission to collect, but like any data you collect it's strictly use case bound and you still have to list how its used, how long stored etc. even if you don't need permissions). Also to be clear if you accept the base premise of GDPR it's pretty intuitive to judge if it's an exception or not.

5. in some countries, there are highly misguided "cookie popup" laws predating GDPR (they are actually about cookies, not data collection in general). This are national laws and such the EU would prefer to have removed. Work on it is in process but takes way to long. I'm also not fully sure about the sate of that. So in that context, yes they should and want to kill "cookie popups". That just doesn't mean what most people think it does (as it has nothing to do with GDPR).

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